Mount Gay has launched a series called “The Original Spirits” highlighting artisans and craftsmen who make things the good old fashion way; with their bare hands. The videos celebrate these individuals and draw parallels to the brand’s own handcrafted history of rum-making in Barbados.

This episode features James Tucker, co-founder of the celebrated San Francisco-based letterpress studio, The Aesthetic Union. In the video Tucker works on a woodcut and makes a print on a hand fed, foot treadle operated, press from 1910. Watch the video below.

Heads up for all you artists and designers out there, The Space is looking for original, groundbreaking ideas for people to experience on mobiles and tablets. Any artist over 18 from anywhere in the world can apply.

The Space is a free public space, a not-for-profit public service for artists and audiences around the world, set up by the BBC and the Arts Council of England.

Successful ideas will be shortlisted and asked for more information via email. Not only will The Space offer winners a paid commission, as well as an online platform to publish their work, they will also receive training and mentoring support to help develop their expertise.

Japanese designer Nigo is unloading a bunch of contemporary art, jewellery, and furniture from his personal collection through a Sotheby’s auction entitled NIGO® Only Lives Twice. The founder of Bape said “I wanted to have an estate sale of my own but obviously I couldn’t get any enjoyment from it myself if I was dead. So I decided to do it now.”

My friends Jasper and Amy have started a fun little clothing brand, aimed at kids ages 2-10, called Big Bad Wolf. Designs will be released each month from an impressive list of artists including: James Jean, Nychos, Dabs Myla, Tristan Eaton, Andrea Wan, Evah Fan, Madsteez, and many others. The shirt above was designed by artist Yoskay Yamamoto.

Something tells me they’re gonna do alright! You can follow the project on Instagram @bigbadwolfkids.

I’m interested to know what people’s thoughts are on the new ad-free social network, Ello. Many are calling it the “Facebook Killer” and the “Anti-Facebook”, while others are quite skeptical. Some are concerned that, because of the $435k of seed funding Ello received from a Venture Capital film (source), they won’t actually keep their word and will eventually turn around sell all the users and make their exit.

I joined Ello to see what all the hype was about (I haven’t done much, but you can find me here: ello.co/booooooom) and I have to admit it does feel like a breath of fresh air, at least in terms of how relaxing the user experience is. This is probably due to the fact that not many people are on it yet but it feels more like an image bookmarking site than a social network. I guess this is where my skepticism comes in, will anyone besides graphic designers actually use this thing? If you’re tired of Facebook, do you even want to jump to a new platform?

Apparently they “don’t have a problem with porn” (source) and are going to allow NSFW content. It appears they’re trying to be less Facebook and more Tumblr with this decision (as well as their decision to open the flood gates on animated gifs). The failure of Google+ so far proves that people don’t want their social network to be like Pinterest; the question Ello poses is do I want my social network to be like Tumblr?

If you haven’t received an invite to try out Ello yet, I have a few invites. Leave a comment below, and I’ll randomly pick a few people at the end of the day. Regardless if you’re on Ello or not, if you have some thoughts on what your ideal social network would look like, lets hear ’em.

This week our sponsor is once again Craftsy which provides resources for creatives in the form of videos and tutorials. It’s been nice to find a sponsor that’s a good fit for what I’m trying to do with Booooooom; making art accessible.

Craftsy is offering a Free Figure Drawing class that teaches you the basics; things like blocking in, contour lines, and methods for describing light and shadow. If you skipped art school altogether this is worth checking out if you want to pick up some fundamentals. The best part being it costs nothing.

My good friend Mark Paul Deren aka Madsteez is one of my absolute favourite people to hang with, and one of the most talented artists I know. He’s painted murals all over the world, and done so with one regular eye and one crazy eye. By crazy eye I mean he can’t see anything out of it other than random colour gradients; a rare condition he was born with.

Mark is teaming up with a filmmaker named Jamie Heinrich to make a short film, and they’re using Kickstarter to fund the project in a pretty unique way. Mark will be painting a mural made of up to 1,000 20″ x 20″ sections and donors to the project will each get one of the painted sections.

Watch the video below to get a better idea of the film they’re making!